On May 29, the body that governs world soccer, FIFA, will vote on whether to suspend Israel from international play.

FIFA’s 209-member countries will vote on a motion introduced by the Palestinian Football Association, which is calling for the suspension on claims that Israel is hindering Palestinian soccer and breaking international law.

Here’s what the Palestinians want, how Israel is fighting back, and how this could all shake out.

Palestinians want freedom of movement for soccer players and to shut down settlement teams.

The Palestinian Football Association, or PFA, says Israel is blocking its players from getting to games. Israeli security forces have blocked players and coaches from traveling to international matches, and haven’t allowed players to go between the West Bank and Gaza. Susan Shalabi, director of the PFA’s international department, told JTA that six top players were prevented from traveling to a match in 2010.

Israel, Shalabi said, also is preventing the Palestinian Authority from building soccer facilities. Since 2009, she said, Israel has prevented construction materials for a soccer field from entering the Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahiya.

“The decisions to let someone in or out were arbitrary,” Shalabi told JTA on Tuesday. “There were always security reasons for the Israeli occupation to deny someone from coming.”

The PFA also claims that Israeli settlements’ soccer teams should not be allowed to play in Israel’s league, saying they are located in Palestinian territory. Five such teams compete: Maaleh Adumim, Ariel, Kiryat Arba, the Jordan Valley and Givat Zeev.

If the Palestinian motion passes, Israel would be barred from international soccer.

Soccer is Israel’s most popular sport, and though Israel qualified for a World Cup tournament only once, in 1970, Israeli soccer teams frequently travel abroad for matches. Coming amid growing economic, academic and cultural boycott efforts against Israel, expulsion from international competition in the world’s most popular sport would be a sharp blow for everyday Israelis.

Israel is pushing back by lobbying foreign governments and citing security threats.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry has been lobbying governments to oppose the motion on the grounds that it’s a political dispute unrelated to soccer.

Shlomi Barzel, the Israeli Soccer Association’s head of communications, told JTA that Israel sees the initiative as a way for Jibril Rajoub, a senior P.A. official and head of the PFA, to hurt Israel’s international standing.

“Even the biggest Israel-hater in the world understands this has a political basis,” Barzel told JTA. “It’s not relevant.”

Barzel said the Palestinians’ complaints all concerned Israel’s security forces, not its soccer teams. He claimed that only 1 percent of all Palestinian soccer players are denied travel. When Israel denies exit, he said, it’s because the player in question is known to present a security risk.

Regarding settlement teams, Barzel said that as long as Israel considers the settlements its sovereign territory, the teams will be allowed to play in Israeli leagues.

In 2013, Netanyahu met with FIFA President Sepp Blatter to provide photographic evidence that Israel said shows Palestinian terror groups using soccer fields to launch rockets at Israel.

This isn’t the first time the two sides have clashed over soccer.

Palestinian sports officials have long been railing against Israeli restrictions on their teams. In 2012, the head of the Palestinian Olympic delegation voiced similar complaints to JTA about freedom of movement. Two years ago, Blatter convened a meeting of the heads of the Israeli and Palestinian soccer associations and created a task force to resolve the issue.

The talks led to a 2013 FIFA proposal mandating that the PFA notify Palestinian and Israeli authorities of player movement 35 days in advance of travel, and then be given two more weeks to change their player list. But the proposal has failed to resolve the dispute.

In 2014, Rajoub threatened to put forth a motion to suspend Israel at that year’s FIFA Congress in Sao Paolo, Brazil. But he backed off after FIFA resolved to continue working toward a resolution, appointing Cypriot soccer chief Costakis Koutsokoumnis to oversee the issue.

Shalabi said the Palestinians would withdraw the motion only if Israel meets the PFA’s demands. She said the Israel Football Association should criticize Israeli security restrictions when they interfere with Palestinian soccer.

Barzel supported Israel’s security policy, but said Israel wants to continue negotiating within FIFA’s framework. He added that Israel has repeatedly proposed a match between the Israeli and Palestinian national teams because Israel believes “soccer can connect people.”

FIFA President Sepp Blatter wants to strike a deal to prevent the vote.

Blatter is visiting Israel and the Palestinian Authority this week, meeting with Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas separately in hopes of finding a resolution.

Blatter has staked out a middle ground on the issue. He opposes Israel’s suspension and, like Israel, supports continuing negotiations. But he also wrote in the May 15 issue of the FIFA Weekly magazine that Israel must make concessions to the Palestinians.

“A solution is only a realistic proposition when those who are privileged are prepared to concede something and contribute to equality,” he wrote. “The onus in this respect is on Israel, with its outstanding infrastructure, fully functioning professional football league and economic context.”

Rotem Kemer, the Israeli federation’s chief executive, said Tuesday that Israel has approved more than 95 percent of the Palestinian requests this year for players to move between Gaza and the West Bank and to travel abroad. In a conference call to foreign journalists, he said the Palestinian association was holding its Israeli counterpart “hostage in a fight against our government.”

Netanyahu praised Blatter for opposing the politicization of sport. “Sport is a vehicle of goodwill among nations. The thing that could destroy the Football Association is politicizing it. You politicize it once with Israel, then you politicize it for everyone, and it will cause the deterioration of a great institution,” Netanyahu said.

Blatter was quoted late Tuesday, after talks with Netanyahu, saying he was confident the issue would be resolved. “Football is more than a game. Football has the power to connect people. Football has the power to construct bridges,” he said. “Football shall unite people and not divide people.”

But he also informed reporters that he didn’t have the power to take the issue off the FIFA agenda.Blattersaid he was passing a message on from Netanyahu to the Palestinian football chiefs and it would be up to them how they responded.

“We are here in the King David (Hotel) and I feel I am a little bit in Camp David,” saidBlatter.“What they do with this message it is then up to them but I will, and I will try until the FIFA congress is open — in exactly 10 days — that we can avoid such a situation,” addedBlatter.

Barzel thinks Blatter’s efforts will succeed, but Shalabi said she was “pessimistic.”

The truth is, the UN health assembly should single out Israel—as a beacon of humanity.

The UN should single out Israel because if you walk into any Israeli hospital or clinic, you will see it replete with Palestinians receiving world-class medical treatment.

And this was true even this past summer while Hamas fired thousands of rockets at Israel, and placed their terrorist command center under the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, a despicable abuse of health rights unmentioned by the world health assembly.

The UN should single out Israel because its doctors have created the amazing “Save A Child’s Heart” program, which has provided life-saving cardiac surgery to more than 3,400 children from 48 different countries, training doctors and nurses from China to Zanzibar. About half the patients are Muslims from the West Bank, Gaza and other Arab countries.

The UN should single out Israel because it was a world leader in responding to the deadly earthquake in Nepal, sending a 260-member army team of medics and search and rescue experts who treated 1,600 victims, including 85 surgeries and eight infant deliveries.

And the UN should single out Israel because its Nobel Prize-winning scientists and innovative biotech companies have become global innovators who create therapeutic products, diagnostic tools and revolutionary drug-delivery techniques benefiting people all over the world.

GENEVA, May 20, 2015 - As Israeli hospitals continue their life-saving treatment for escalating numbers of wounded Syrians fleeing to the Golan from the Assad regime’s barbaric attacks, the U.N. reached new heights of absurdity today by accusing Israel of violating the health rights of Syrians in the Golan.

By a vote of 104 to 4, with 6 abstentions and 65 absent, the Jewish state was singled out as the world’s top violator of health rights by the annual assembly of the U.N.’s World Health Organization.

The resolution, which adopted two reports heaping blame upon Israel for allegedly violating the health rights of both the Palestinians and Druze residents of the Golan, was the 2015 assembly’s only treatment of a specific country situation.

There was no debate on the health of the Yemeni people now under indiscriminate Saudi bombardment, no mention at all of the 1,850 Yemenis killed, the 7,394 wounded, and the 545,000 displaced, many of whom are desperate to find food.

On the contrary, the representative of Saudi Arabia’s theocracy took the floor today, without any sense of shame, to denounce “Israeli intransigence,” and to beseech “all peace loving states” to adopt the distorted and politicized resolution.

The despotic regime must have felt especially emboldened as the gathering took place adjacent to the Human Rights Council, where Saudi Arabia is not only a full member—elected in 2013 by more than two-thirds of the UN General Assembly—but, according to the Tribune de Genève, is actively lobbying to become president next year. If Qaddafi’s Libya won the post in 2003, why shouldn’t King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud get his turn?

All of this while the Wahhabist regime advertises the hiring of eight more executioners to carry out beheadings, which have spiraled this year to more than double the amount in 2014. ISIS can only be jealous of what this UNHRC presidential candidate has achieved.

Nor is this year’s UN health assembly holding a single debate on the health rights of Ukranian civilians caught in a war with Russian-backed militias. The 6,000 people killed, and the one million displaced, are simply of no interest.

Preoccupied by the alleged sins of Israelis, the UN turned a blind eye to the latest warning by health experts, reported in Newsweek, that Ukraine is in imminent danger of experiencing the first polio epidemic Europe has seen for decades. “Millions of children are at risk from a range of crippling or fatal infectious diseases, including measles, diphtheria and rubella,” said the report. Yet the UN couldn’t be bothered—and Russia gleefully voted today for the PLO-drafted condemnation of Israel.

Most absurd of all, though, was that today’s text falsely claimed a dire need for “health-related technical assistance” for “the Syrian population in the occupied Syrian Golan” — who in fact have excellent treatment — and said nothing about the Syrian population being slaughtered in Syria.

Instead, the scapegoating of Israel—in the form of a special debate, two lopsided reports, the resolution, and the publication of country submissions—provided a UN platform for Assad’s murderous regime.

“The Israeli occupation authorities continue to experiment on Syrian and Arab prisoners with medicines and drugs and to inject them with pathogenic viruses,” wrote Syria, in a submission laced with anti-Semitic conspiracy tropes, yet circulated as an official UN document on today’s agenda.

Unable to deny Israel’s medical treatment of wounded Syrians, the regime concocted another plot: Israel deliberately heals regime opponents so that they can “resume their subversive terrorist activities directed against the country’s peaceful citizens and its infrastructure.”

If the European Union—all of whose member states disgracefully joined the jackals by voting for today’s resolution—had wanted, they could have set the record straight, and taken a stand against such base demonization of the Jewish state.

The EU states could have introduced their own resolution about how Syria has killed more than 200,000 of their own people, including 20,000 children, caused three million to flee as refugees, and displaced another six million within Syria itself, amounting to the utter destruction of the health rights of the Syrian people.

Yet the EU was silent. Instead, it justified its vote by claiming that the resolution was “technical.” It’s the old Brussels-Ramallah wink-and-nod game : the PLO drafts a harsher text at the beginning, knowing it will revise it later to allow the Europeans to pretend that they achieved a “balanced” text. Israel is then expected to celebrate that it has been lynched with a lighter rope.

The truth is, the UN health assembly should single out Israel—as a beacon of humanity.

The UN should single out Israel because if you walk into any Israeli hospital or clinic, you will see it replete with Palestinians receiving world-class medical treatment.

And this was true even this past summer while Hamas fired thousands of rockets at Israel, and placed their terrorist command center under the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, a despicable abuse of health rights unmentioned by the world health assembly.

The UN should single out Israel because its doctors have created the amazing “Save A Child’s Heart” program, which has provided life-saving cardiac surgery to more than 3,400 children from 48 different countries, training doctors and nurses from China to Zanzibar. About half the patients are Muslims from the West Bank, Gaza and other Arab countries.

The UN should single out Israel because it was a world leader in responding to the deadly earthquake in Nepal, sending a 260-member army team of medics and search and rescue experts who treated 1,600 victims, including 85 surgeries and eight infant deliveries.

And the UN should single out Israel because its Nobel Prize-winning scientists and innovative biotech companies have become global innovators who create therapeutic products, diagnostic tools and revolutionary drug-delivery techniques benefiting people all over the world.

Yet so long as the UN instead descends into irrationalism, scapegoating the Jewish state for all the world’s health problems just as medieval Europe accused the Jews of poisoning the wells, the organization betrays the cause of humanity and the noble principles upon which it was founded.

Hillel Neuer is executive director of UN Watch.

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VOTE COUNT

From the official UN summary for May 20, 2015, 68th World Health Assembly

Item 20. Health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan

The Chairman opened the item and invited the Committee to consider the draft decision contained in document A68/B/Conf./2 Health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan.Palestine also made a statement after which the Director of Health of UNRWA gave his report.

In accordance with Rule 72 of the Rules of Procedure, a roll-call vote was taken. The vote resulted in 104 votes in favour to four votes against, with six abstentions and 65 Member States absent, as follows: